To the Editor:
By unanimously overruling the directly affected residents’ desires to put a bike lane on King Street, could our council overlords really want to enable more bike usage; less vehicular traffic? Pedaling a bike does burn calories, and surely more pedalers mean fewer cars. What’s not to like about less vehicular congestion and better health, at least for the pedalers?
My alter ego thinks he knows: The goal is not happy bikers nor their better health. It's slower internal combustion machines on Alexandria’s roadways. The King Street bike lane issue revealed bike lanes narrow roadways, and narrow roads produce cautious drivers who drive ever slower. Ergo, more bike lanes.
But are bike lanes really necessary for traffic calming? Traffic is destined to slow to a crawl as it is. This is because our city council is implementing density policies intended to attract more and more people into Alexandria who, collectively, will bring evermore automobiles onto city streets. Nearly 6,000 additional vehicles were registered in Alexandria in 2012, for example.
No way around it: our elected representatives’ density policies are cramming Alexandria. Most of the new residents have cars. Their cars will traverse a forever finite, never-to-increase number of roads. Our city council overlords’ density policies are guaranteeing more vehicular congestion; not less, which will perforce cause slower traffic.
Now let’s toss bikes onto already crowded roadways. The owner-operators of bikes in our community are a special breed. Part iconoclast; part health nut. Appealing attributes to me, frankly. If their understandable antipathy toward earth-warming, smog-producing cars is already high, will it go off-scale high when they find they're breathing exhaust fumes from more and more cars thereby making less healthy their enviro-friendly biking? Inquiring minds want to know.
Jimm Roberts
Alexandria